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3.08.2012

Wine Bottling Weekend

On Saturday, we headed out to Lodi to help with the bottling for my brother in law's wine, McCay Cellars.

This is his third year bottling, but the first year that we have been there for it.It was totally fascinating.The bottling process moves quickly. Luckily, my job was to take pictures & keep the girls out of the way.

I should have taken a video of how fast all these conveyor belts were moving.
About 9,000 bottles of wine were bottled, labeled & packed into cases in less than 4 hours.

All of this takes place in the back of a Big Rig. Mobile Wine Bottlers are the easiest way to bottle wine.

Every thing happens in the truck & then the cases go down the conveyor belt, ready to be shipped.

My brother in law's friend, Kevin, helping "catch" the wine cases.

This is a true family winery!

I had fun taking pictures inside the warehouse where they store all the wine before it is pumped into the bottling truck.

The girls had fun checking out the stainless steel wine barrels, where Kate exclaimed, "Yum! Smells like grape juice!"

The last bit of the Zinfandel had to be drained out by hand because the pump couldn't get it.

It went straight into wine glasses of the people helping bottle.

Good old fashion Family fun at the Winery.

After we bottled, we headed back to the McCay house for a celebratory dinner.
My brother in law invited some fun people to the dinner, including a wine blogger and the chef from Wine & Roses.
It was a fun day & I am so glad we got to be watch the bottling process, it was really neat.
If you are a wine lover like us, it was fun to see how it all works, from vineyard to your wine glass. Cheers!

OK, so now that we know you were pregnant at this time, I'm dying to know...did the smell make you sick all day? We LOVE wine, but when I was pregnant with #1 my husband couldn't open a bottle in the house without my sniffer causing problems for my tummy. :)

Sounds like you had loads of fun! I hope next time you can experience the wine bottling process. It will surely give you a new experience. Well, it is not every day that we see how things are made. We usually see them at the stores, bottled and ready for our consumption. But seeing the process would certainly make you appreciate it more. You never know, this might inspire you to make your own wine in the future!